Ibiza Hotel Trials Fingerprint Payment

By Nick Clayton

It could be the solution to the age-old vacation question: Where do you put your wallet when you are dressed for the pool? Ibiza hotel Ushuaïa Beach claims to be the first in the world to introduce a fingerprint payment system.

Guests register their fingerprints to one or more credit cards. They can then pay for food, drinks and services simply by touching two fingers to a biometric reader.

The system has been supplied by Barcelona start-up PayTouch which claims that the whole payment process takes less than five seconds with transactions being verified in real time. The company says its platform was developed on the same technology as banking institutions, including compliance with the PCI-DSS framework for secure card payments.

PayTouch was founded less than two years ago by a group of five entrepreneurs from Barcelona. It is partially funded by the Spanish government, but mainly bootstrapped by the founders who come largely from the telecoms industry.

It is perhaps not surprising that the Ushuaïa Beach Hotel was the first to use the PayTouch system. We reported last year on its Facebook experiment. Using RFID bracelets guests were able to share holiday experiences through specially-equipped pillars dotted throughout the hotel.

Over the summer over 2,000 people registered for the wrist-bands and around 90% became fans. They uploaded 6,000 pictures with a unique share range of about 600,000. The hotel, which opened last year, now has 100,000 “likes”.

The group is headquartered in Ibiza where it was founded in the 1960s and was part of the package holiday boom. In recent years it has focused on more upmarket properties and expanded into Mexico and the Caribbean.

Comments (1 of 1)

About Tech Europe

Tech Europe covers Europe’s technology leaders, their companies, and the people and industries that support them — and their ideas. The blog is edited by Ben Rooney, with contributions from The Wall Street Journal and Dow Jones Newswires.